installing Linux to disk image

[Longman, Bill]

> Clint, thanks for your idea. I am installing YDL on a
> 20 GB partition of another computer (an iMac). I would
> appreciate it if someone could tell me what steps to
> follow to implement Clint's idea of cloning that
> partition to a disk image that I could then copy to
> the iBook that is running OS X. If necessary, I can
> install OS X to the iMac, so that it would run OS X
> and Linux on different partitions. The hard disk of
> the iBook, however, only has one partition, so I would
> need to mount the disk image to run Linux, if that is
> possible.

There is a very easy way to do this if you have the disk image in CD ISO
format.

You can mount an ISO image using the loopback filesystem.

1 - Save the ISO image onto your disk somewhere
2 - put mount entries in your fstab
3 - mount the image

Here is how my Mandrake system looks:

$ ls /mnt/windows/iso
Mandrake91-cd1-inst.i586.iso   Mandrake91-cd2-ext.i586.iso
$ grep loop /etc/fstab
/mnt/windows/iso/Mandrake91-cd1-inst.i586.iso /cd1 iso9660
loop,ro,user,noauto 0 0
/mnt/windows/iso/Mandrake91-cd2-ext.i586.iso /cd1 iso9660
loop,ro,user,noauto 0 0
$ mount /cd1
$ mount
/dev/hda5 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /mnt/windows type vfat (rw,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0
none on /tmp type tmpfs (rw)
/mnt/windows/iso/Mandrake91-cd1-inst.i586.iso on /cd1 type iso9660
(blah,blah)

Bill